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Let us live on the Cross. The Cross is the denial of our will. Heaven is on the Cross because Jesus is there.

The proud person is like a grain of wheat thrown into water: it swells, it gets big. Expose that grain to the fire: it dries up, it burns. The humble soul is like a grain of wheat thrown into the earth: it descends, it hides itself, it disappears, it dies; but to revive in heaven.

You may be sure, if you do all you can and prepare yourselves for contemplation as I have described, that if He does not grant it to you, He is keeping back this consolation in reserve only to give it to you all at once in heaven.

I invited the whole earth to bless you, to serve you. Forever and always, never to end! I invited the entire sea to bless you, to serve you. Forever and always, never to end! I called him, invited ungrateful man, to bless you, to serve you, to praise and to love you, forever and always, never to end.

Suffering is a great favor. Remember that everything soon comes to an end . . . and take courage. Think of how our gain is eternal.

. . . And yet I have never experienced more fully the sweetness and mercy of Our Lord. He did not send this heavy cross when it would, I believe, have discouraged me, but chose a time when I was able to bear it. Now it does no more than deprive me of all natural satisfaction in my longing for Heaven.

"To watch in prayer"- this is to say the same thing that Elijah said with the words, "to stand before the face of God." Prayer is looking up into the face of the Eternal. We can do this only when the spirit is awake in its inmost depths, freed from all earthly occupations and pleasures that benumb it. Being awake in body does not guarantee this consciousness, nor does rest required by nature interfere.

For we must not be without our cross, even as our Beloved had his cross, until he died the death of love.

...we render God the most true and acceptable service by caring only for His honor and glory and forgetting ourselves, our advantages, comfort and happiness. How can we be self-oblivious, while keeping ourselves under such strict control that we are afraid to move, or even to think, or to leave our minds enough liberty to desire God's greater glory and to rejoice in the glory which He possesses? When His Majesty wishes the mind to rest from working He employs it in another manner, giving it a light and knowledge far above any obtainable by its own efforts and absorbing it entirely into Himself. Then, though it knows not how, it is filled with wisdom such as it could never gain for itself by striving to suspend the thoughts.

Our life is the life of heaven. St John of the Cross has said that the contemplative has no task here below that she will not have in heaven. The difference is that on earth that task is done in the obscurity of faith; in heaven there will be no veil between God and us.

Don't be troubled, little sisters, if I suffer very much and if you see in me, as I've already said, no sign of happiness at the moment of my death. Our Lord really dies as a Victim of Love, and you see what His agony was!

Therefore the whole perpetual sacrificial offering of Christ at the cross, in the holy Mass, and in the eternal glory of heaven can be conceived as a single great thanksgiving as Eucharist: as gratitude for creation, salvation, and consummation. Christ presents himself in the name of all creation, whose prototype he is and to which he descended to renew it from the inside out and lead it to perfection. But he also calls upon the entire created world itself, united with him, to give the Creator the tribute of thanks that is his due.